dougw

I just watched Revolution OS. Really enjoyed it. Indeed it is somewhat of old news to many of us, but it is also nice to see the faces and personalities driving the GNU, Linux, and FOSS movement as a whole.

The first spam has hit news.yc....

"IllinoisVENTURES is a seed and early-stage technology venture capital firm focused on research-derived companies in information technologies, physical sciences and life sciences, with a particular emphasis on those deriving from research conducted at the University of Illinois and other regional research institutions."

Also, look at their portfolio companies. I wouldn't say they are as software oriented as programs such as YC.

Regardless, they come off rather unprofessional.

I don't know how competent their application makes them seem...

"Week 9: Business model stuff"

Paul, there is nothing to the amount of attention given to applicants after acceptance?

Great post. Thanks paul!

I wasn't implying anything about Scribd's growth. Just commenting on the obvious, continued growth of Reddit.

"We manage to get back around 1AM and I’m stunned to see that kids are sitting and talking and playing ping-pong. What’s wrong with them?, I wonder. I just came back from an arduous journey and they’re playing like it’s nothing! I head up to my room, but nobody seems to notice a thing. My roommates are also just sitting at their computers, as if everything is normal"

I know the feeling. My friends and family do not understand my desire to start a company. The rush of creation that one expereiences when they are working for themselves makes all else seem insignificant and minor. Well put.

"Should Google and Youtube be forced instead to add a link to the contents official home (where legal copies can be purchased) and thereby referring potential customers back to the aggrieved party?"

Would this mean that the aggrieved party would then share some revenue for sales generated by YouTube? I think this is only fair. Mark Cuban talks about this a little in this post: http://news.ycombinator.com/comments?id=4859

Yes, it is. Reddit sure has a nice, strong looking curve.

North Carolina. University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill to be exact. Yourself?

I like the wider layout. Much more engaging and consumable. Subtle, still YC, yet well done. Kudos.

Interesting.

For the lazy among us: http://www.alexa.com/data/details/traffic_details?site0=scribd.com&site1=reddit.com&y=r&z=1&h=300&w=500&range=6m&size=Medium&url=reddit.com

If only I weren't in school on the East coast.

Seems like a case of treating the symptom not the ailment itself...

Indeed, it has been widely noted that craigslist's authenic feel (hyped by the .org TLD) and community fostering ruggedness has created a cult-like following. It seems that their lack of graphics, change, and heavy UI development has kept the installed user base, well, installed, and growing.

http://www.startupnation.com/pages/newsroom/PR_2006_0128.asp

Tangentially related:

http://paul.kedrosky.com/archives/2007/03/07/five_questions.html

I am a firm believer that our schools should have a heavy financial component at some point around 9th and 12th grades. The amount of debt that many have these days in their early 20's is outrageous.

Just curious if there is anyone else on news.YC that had their first programming experiences with their first graphing calculator? I started with my TI-83 and z80 Assembly in 6th grade learning at ticalc.org.

This sounds like a wonderful idea. Not entirely new, but a great way to keep one ear to the ground during the critical phase of business development where you want to get a solid product core out to users.

However, this could never scale with growth. I don't think this is a problem as the early adoption gives way to regular customers and viral growth, but they need to plan for proper customer support after directly calling the CEO is no longer viable.

Does anyone know of a good FOSS product that emulates the functionality of Lotus Teamroom? I am anal about my organization and much prefer a directory structure for it's ease of organization. I currently use a hacked verstion of Relay (http://www.ecosmear.com/relay) with a custom written XML parsing function to add context to directory and files for my Wiki-/teamroom- like functionality. However, is there a good alternative to this that a reader knows of?

I don't know, I really don't feel like this article contributed much.

Much agreed, she asks all the questions I want to know before I wanted to know them!

I couldn't agree with you more. It isn't until you really experience what it is like to work for someone else before you realize what it's like to work for someone else.

After 2 years of corporate work, I'm ready to step out on my own as a result of frustration with what other people want me to do. Sometimes it takes the mother bird to force the chick out of the nest before it learns to fly ....

Does anyone want to guess what industries IT spans for the consideration of the survey referenced?

Without a community you either have to create a sales force in-house or use outside "hired" labor/advertising. Essentially, without community, it will be up to you as a entrepreneur to evangelize your project. Community ensures viral growth through word-of-mouth advertising and it gives value to the network directly proportional to the number of users. I personally disagree that community is not necessary. But, I don't think delicious does either. For one, delicious has benefited greatly from it's community following. Yes, it is a tool, and I do use it - under the normal circumstance - as an individual using a tool he own privately. However, community allows me utility and efficiency when I can search for quality links tagged by others, or simply click tags that make sense when I'm saving a favorite. I think you shouldn't use the word ignore here, it seems out of context. Rather, I read him to mean you should focus on building a valuable tool for users and let the community follow. He never says to stifle community growth.

I really liked the comment on giving some service away before account creation. In my experience, one of the largest hurdles to user adoption is getting something useful from the site. If a user is able to see the value of the service *before* putting something into it, they are more likely to understand the offering and accepting the reward for 5 minutes worth of forms. There are so many services competing for users attention and everyone of them are fighting for their niche. You have to put something on the table to gain the initial interest to keep the user on a site long enough to make it past the click of the back button. I could not agree more with this point.

This recent story relates: http://news.ycombinator.com/comments?id=824

I find the most valuable part of this article the link at the bottom pertaining to questions cofounders should mull over before entering the venture together (For ease: http://onstartups.com/home/tabid/3339/bid/99/Important-Questions-Startup-Co-Founders-Should-Ask-Each-Other.aspx). I have had a struggle finding cofounders that complement my style, skills, and ideas. (Any coders out there that want to talk, hah?). One thing I find missing from this list is that if you can't address these issues, or fore go these questions citing the fact that they will be addressed when the time comes (because coding is more fun) then you should rethink your partnership all together. I find it much more important to ensure that anyone I am involved with is available for open and comfortable communication about all areas of the business.

I'd like to see a list (RSS feed?) of my comments that have been replied to so that discussion can continue.

It seems like a lot of this information is pulled directly from Cal's book "Building Scalable Web Sites" (Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/Building-Scalable-Web-Sites-Applications/dp/0596102356/). If you are interested in gaining some of the spoken context behind the slides, this is a great read. It was reviewed on slashdot a while back (http://books.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/07/26/1357210). If your venture is a site that is going to eventually need to scale due to high resource consumption from individual users (whether this be storage, CPU, or database requirements) I suggest you pick up a copy of this book to know how to better address this concern during design rather than in deployment!